Why Does Meryl Streep Play Miranda Priestly as a Different Character in ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’?

“The Devil Wears Prada 2” commits a sin that would give any glossy-magazine profile writer a shudder of recognition. It falls in love with its subject — and delivers, rather than a frank and delicious portrait, a puff piece.

In this franchise’s first installment, released in 2006, editor-from-hell Miranda Priestly ruled her domain with a terrifying, unflappable calm. That her standing in the publishing world are diminished 20 years later reflects the reality of the print business. But that she reacts to her misfortunes with a practically cuddly amiability indicates that this sequel, determined to super-serve fans what they seem to want, has lost the plot, and the spirit of who Miranda is (or was). 

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As once again played by Meryl Streep, Miranda enters the sequel recognizably enough. For convoluted and not-terribly-interesting reasons, plucky protagonist Andy (Anne Hathaway), a career investigative journalist long removed from her assistant days, gets hired to run features at Runway and reunites with Miranda. This is unpleasant news for the top dog, who airily acts as if she has no recollection of Andy before issuing a few snarls.

But then, the wheels start to fall off the town car. The film, throughout, prises apart every element of the first movie that it can. (The faux-Met Gala has the theme “Spring Florals,” an homage to a throwaway line in film one. And no points for guessing the shade of blue of the jazzy sweater vest Andy wears in the final scene.) And for Miranda, that means Streep’s entire performance seems to be drawn from the brief but memorable scene from 2006 in which the editor confesses her vulnerability after disclosing the details of her divorce. This time, Miranda’s struggles, in a collapsing industry, are overdrawn to a level of farce that doesn’t suit. (Her attempt to hang up her own coat, rather than toss it at an assistant, belongs in a different movie, or in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch about Miranda. Ashley Padilla, get writing!)

Then there’s the scene where Miranda is forced to fly coach to Milan Fashion Week, due to budget cuts at Runway, and find herself in middle seat. This isn’t a fish out of water: this is a character who seems frightened and confused by life — so diminished that she’s lost the aspirational, unapologetic power that made her so compelling. (Can’t Miranda, who lives in a lavish townhouse, afford to pay for her own upgrade?) Worse, Streep, that master of inflection, barely even sounds like the Miranda Priestly we recall. Perhaps it’s that she must spend so much of the movie in a defensive crouch. Perhaps, too, it’s a sign that an attempt to humanize the character instead took out some load-bearing elements.

Consider the recent aside from real-life Vogue editor Anna Wintour in Wintour and Streep’s joint cover profile. Wintour, who has become Streep’s real-life friend in the years since 2006, asked Streep to read the sequel’s script and report back. “She called me back and said, ‘Anna, I think it’s going to be all right.’” 

No one might have expected Wintour to think the first film was “all right.” Based on a roman à clef by a real former assistant to Wintour, it was a portrait drawn by poison pen, with very occasional humanizing moments. As part of damage control from the film, Wintour gave a remarkable amount of access for a 2009 documentary, “The September Issue,” as if to prove that she wasn’t the boss from hell. (In a seeming nod to “The Devil Wears Prada” novel, by Lauren Weisberger, much is made of the idea that Andy might cash in by writing a tell-all book about Miranda — a notion treated as blatantly unethical and referred to as “whining,” up until the moment Miranda authorizes it, delivering a wildly sympathetic monologue about how the world ought to see how passionate she is about her work.)

It’s a credit to Wintour’s savvy that she unexpectedly embraced the film, and used it to level up her fame and prominence. And it’s still another that she became so indispensable to its reputation in the long term that the production necessarily couldn’t depict her as anything harsher than a lovely, helpful woman with a few quirks. 

Granted, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is surprisingly clear-eyed about the challenges a magazine editor might face in a time of shrinking margins, so much so that I wondered at times if Wintour had given a round of notes. Someone on set is clearly a magazine junkie: At one point, Andy finds herself at a party with the most legendary editor alive, Tina Brown, and a magazine writer on the vanguard, Jia Tolentino.

The challenges Priestly faces are existential; the woman on whom she’s based could likely relate. In “The September Issue,” the real Wintour has a moment of candor as she attempts to pull together her magazine’s biggest volume of the year. She speaks about how frustrating it can be not to get what she wants, and wonders if that means it’s time to retire. She was in her late 50s then — now, she’s 76. And while she seems immune to change, the world around her has shifted. She’s outlasted contemporaries and onetime rivals like Brown, Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter and Elle’s Robbie Myers — and outlasted the next generation of editors. In real life, Miranda probably wouldn’t still be working with consigliere and preferred editor Nigel (Stanley Tucci). But that would be a tragedy, not a comedy.

The movie stops short of that. But it does bring Miranda down to earth, sapping what the character can be. Part of the electric charge of the first film was how remote and unknowable Miranda was: She was like Darth Vader in couture. And just as seeing the ups and downs of Anakin in the “Star Wars” prequels shattered that character’s mystique, seeing Miranda at close range fritters away her aura. In the first film, Miranda wasn’t allowed into the residence, and (but for one moment!) neither were we; in this film, we’re at home with Miranda all the time. A sequence at Miranda’s summer home in the Hamptons — presaged by Andy pulling elaborate sequined costume changes from the Runway fashion closet that we never see her wear — has a homespun, even rustic energy. Meryl Streep fit into this Nancy Meyers-inflected aesthetic in “It’s Complicated.” But Miranda Priestly does not. 

Oddly, all of the villain energy of this film has been shifted onto Emily (Emily Blunt), who seems to have snapped and undergone a personality transplant after leaving Runway. Working at Dior and dressed, throughout, like a backup dancer from Madonna’s 2012 MDNA Tour, Emily has hatched a scheme to buy Runway with her tech-billionaire beau’s money and to install herself as its editor-in-chief. (In this, her storyline mirrors rumors that have flown around Lauren Sánchez Bezos for years; a “Devil Wears Prada” film perhaps cannot help but poke fun at a woman in the public eye, even if, this time, it’s chosen an easier target.) The ultimate sign that Emily does not deserve the prize she seeks arrives with the reveal that she plans to feature herself as the magazine’s cover model. Wintour just did a version of that. If Miranda were still staking her claim at the center of Runway’s glossy universe, rather than meekly hiding behind Andy, the film could have been a devilish good time.